Services such as location based services (often focused around personal navigation, e.g. Sat-Nav for vehicles) are becoming very popular with the general public. As such, GPS and Assisted-GPS (A-GPS) technologies (as well as other variations and alternatives, such as GLONASS, etc) are becoming relatively mainstream in a wide range of portable electronic devices. Such satellite systems are known as Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS). GNSS is the standard generic term for satellite navigation systems (“sat nav”) that provide autonomous geo-spatial positioning with global coverage. There are many types of GNSS available, such as NAVSTAR, GLONASS, Beidou, etc.
Such GNSS systems stream data from their respective satellites. This data signalling is then received by GNSS-capable devices. This data streamed by the satellites is sampled by the GNSS receivers of these devices from the continuous transmitted satellite signal into discrete data samples, and raw IQ samples are obtained as results from this sampling operation. These raw IQ data samples contain encoded timing data and other information as various ‘words’ that are useful in determining geographical location of the device that has received the data. The raw IQ data needs to be decoded into raw data bits at the receiver end first before the encoded information contained therein can be used.
Satellite positioning systems can be effective for locating a device's position outdoors, but can be problematic inside buildings or in other places where direct view/line-of-sight of the sky is blocked or obstructed, or reception is poor. It can be difficult to obtain positioning data from the required number of satellites (typically four) to determine geographical location when such complications occur.
In addition to GPS and A-GPS, short-range connectivity/communication solutions such as Bluetooth™ and WiFi (such as the various 802.11 wireless standards) have become common technologies in many portable electronic devices.
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